Google Introduces New Developer Tools for Cloud Platform

The developer community has been a key focus area for Google in its strategy to drive broader enterprise adoption of the company’s Cloud Platform service.
Over the past couple of years, Google has released a variety of new tools and services to help developers build, run and manage applications on its hosted cloud services infrastructure.
Building on those efforts, the company this week announced two new services that the company says will enable developers to build smarter Cloud Platform applications.
One of them, dubbed Cloud Datalab, is a Web-based tool that lets developers write code to discover, analyze, visualize and process data more efficiently in Google Cloud Platform. The other tool, dubbed Google Cloud Shell, gives developers easier access to computing resources on Google's Cloud platform, according to the company.

Cloud Datalab is available in beta starting today and runs on Google's App Engine platform for building Web applications. It enables faster analysis of data in Google Cloud Storage, Compute Engine and BigQuery, Google's director of product management Greg DeMichellie said in a blog post Tuesday.

DeMichellie described Datalab as a tool that developers can use to combine code from Python, SQL and JavaScript more easily and to build data pipelines for BigQuery deployments as well.
Datalab is built on Jupyter, formerly known as iPython, a popular open source tool for creating and sharing large data sets containing a combination of live code, rich media and other data formats.
"Cloud Datalab removes common barriers [to] getting started," DeMichellie said. "Instead it provides a ready-to-use, fully setup, secure, multi-user environment integrated with source control for developers and data scientists."
Google Cloud Shell, meanwhile, is designed for those looking to more easily manage applications and VM instances running on Cloud Platform regardless of where they are located. "Google Cloud Shell provides you with command-line access to computing resources hosted on Google Cloud Platform," DeMichellie noted.
The tool, which is currently released for beta testing, is accessible on Google Developers Console in the form of a virtual machine hosted and managed by Google.
Cloud Shell is a follow-up to a capability that Google announced last year that allows developers to use SSH to access Google Compute Engine instances from the Developer Console. Cloud Launcher enables command line access not just to VM instances, but also to the entire platform, DeMichellie said.
The two new tools are part of a growing portfolio of capabilities that Google has announced recently to make it easier for developers to configure and run applications on its cloud platform.
Earlier this year, for instance, Google announced a configuration management tool dubbed Cloud Deployment Manager to help developers quickly create and deploy production environments using a declarative syntax instead of command line calls.
In March, Google introduced a Cloud Launcher service that lets enterprises deploy about 120 open source applications on its cloud platform with little more than a few clicks.
At that time, the company described the service as something that would reduce some of the time developers typically spend on compiling and configuring applications for deployment.